Thoughts
by Caladria101
Summary: What were they thinking? Moments in time.
1. Divide and Conquer

He glanced sideways at the reassuringly solid presence beside him. The zat charged up. He grimaced a little – he understood the need for it, and if he was going to get shot with one of the things there was no one he'd rather be shot by than Teal'c, but it was an experience that he could really live without. And he hated the thought that at any second he might lose control and hurt an innocent person. Like, _really_ hated the thought.

"Right," he muttered, turning his gaze back to Anise.

He hadn't been kidding when he'd said he'd done the drugged out, strapped to a chair thing. And yet, here he was, doing at least half of it again. He still wasn't exactly sure why.

Well, actually, yes, he was, if he was honest. But Jack O'Neill had found that lying to himself was a pleasant little habit that had got him through a lot, so it'd better get him through this, too.

Speaking of which, would that damn snake get on with it instead of leaving him hanging!? He wondered idly if she was racking up the tension to punish him for rejecting her, but dismissed it out of hand. He still had no idea why she'd done that, and frankly the idea of it still made him feel a little queasy. He wanted this over, he wanted Carter to be ok, and he wanted the snakes off his base, especially the woman messing about with … something … in front of him.

"If you are ready," Anise intoned in that oddly cool and collected voice that she had, like nothing could ever affect her. "We will begin."

Jack gave her a tight nod, and gave a small grimace again. May as well be now as anytime – the longer he left it, the worse Carter's chances were.

His attention suddenly went to the glass as Doc Fraiser banged on it. What was she doing here? She was supposed to be looking after Carter. Sam. Grabbing the microphone with as much haste as he'd ever seen her use, she said "Stop!" with as much command in her voice as the tiny unofficial general she was.

Jakc just stared at her in disbelief. Didn't she know this was Carter's best chance? What could have happened to her that would make Fraiser charge down to the observation room – and she looked completely out of breath by the rise and fall of her shoulders – and put a stop to this.

She didn't explain, just left to fetch his major, leaving everyone in the room to wonder at her actions, Jack most of all. Surely if there was something wrong with Carter – if her programming had kicked in, if she'd tried to hurt herself, the Doc would have said. And they definitely wouldn't be bringing her down here. But what else could it be? If she'd managed to do some harm, surely that was all the more reason to let him go through this, try to find out how to stop the programming once it had started.

He sat, staring straight ahead – not that he had much choice in the matter, no one had thought to remove his head restraint – listening to the footsteps approach. He looked at Carter as she wobbled up to the chair he was strapped up to. She'd really been hit hard by the drugs, and he wondered at the force of will that was keeping her upright.

"Carter?" he asked, with a quizzical rising of his eyebrows and the slight gesture of his hands giving away just how completely clueless he was as to her reasons. "What's up?" The casual tone completely belied the panic that he was feeling. What the hell was wrong with her?

She completely surprised him then. Turning to the rest of the room, she asked, "Could we have a moment alone, please?"

This was odd. He and Carter didn't have moments alone. Especially not in full view of military personnel. Moments alone with Carter had a tendency to lead his brain down paths that his brain should not being travelling.

He was so preoccupied with this, he almost missed everyone leaving, Teal'c's bow of assent barely catching his eye.

"Thanks," he heard her say. She was still slightly leaning on his chair, which was both disconcerting and nice at the same time.

So now they had an empty room.

"Carter, undo this," he said jerking his head up at the restraining band as much as he could. There was no way he was going to be strapped to the thing any longer than he had to. To save Carter's life he was willing to do it, but if she wanted a discussion about whatever then they were coming off, like _right now_.

She nodded in assent, and he felt her fingers push the band up and over his hair. Sighing, he turned to look at her as she leaned closer to him, both of her hands resting on his chair, and lowered her voice like she was going to impart some great secret.

"We're not za'tarcs."

We're not za'tarcs? He _knew _there'd been a mistake! There was no way that Carter was dumb enough to get them za'tarc'ed! Although, surely that was something that needed sharing with, well, all the people that had just been asked to leave the room. He glanced at the door in mild puzzlement, then back to the woman in front of him.

"How do you know?" he asked mildly, keeping his voice as low as hers. If she wanted to keep the discussion between the two of them, then there would be a good reason. Carter didn't do things without good reason. There was no doubt in his mind that she did know, though – she was Carter, if she'd discovered the meaning to life, the universe and everything he wouldn't be completely surprised – but he needed to hear her say that she was safe, that no harm was going to come to her.

"The machine thinks that we have false memories, but we don't. We were lying."

His eyes shot back to her from the spot on the wall they'd been focused on. "I wasn't lying," he objected. He hadn't been – he'd told that damn woman with her too small clothes nothing but the truth, and he resented any implication otherwise. Besides, how dumb would he have to be to lie on a lie detector test.

Well, one that you couldn't fool, anyway. He guessed Special Ops were good for some things.

"Okay. You left something out." A note of resignation had crept into her voice, as if she wasn't liking where this conversation was going. And she was regarding him intently, almost as if she was willing him to understand her line of reasoning. It wasn't working. He stared at her in complete confusion.

"No, I didn't," he said, objecting again. She knew he hadn't left anything out, so where was she going with this?

"Sir," she said, and paused for a second as if she was trying to figure out how to say what she was about to say. "When you wouldn't leave me…" And she paused again. But her tremendous brain power wasn't enough to communicate whatever the hell it was that she was trying to get through.

"Are you sure there wasn't something else that you're not admitting?"

He shook his head slightly in immediate denial, eyes narrowing before he turned his head away, refusing to meet her eyes. If there was a slight inkling of what she was talking about, it was quickly suppressed. Not that. Anything but that.

He met her eyes again. "What are you talkin' about?" he asked, his face still etched with confusion.

"Something neither one of us can admit," she said, not meeting his eyes, "Given our working relationship, our military ranks…" She turned her head to look him squarely in the eye at the last part.

"Oh!" he softly exclaimed, exaggerating the syllable. "Oh, that," he repeated, a lot softer.

'That' – that being the fact that he'd realised, as he'd stood in front of that forcefield with her the other side, that he couldn't live without her. 'That' being the moment, when he stared at her with more anguish than he thought he'd had in him, when he realised that he wasn't the only one who felt something. 'That' being the complete elation that he'd felt that she saw him in that way coupled incredibly intimately with the complete and utter despair that it may be their last moment. The moment when he'd stared at her, knowing that his soul was completely bared before her and not caring because he thought it was going to be their last moment, and because she was staring back with heartbreak in her eyes. He hadn't realised that he still had the strength to feel those feelings, any more. He thought that after Charlie everything he felt would just carry on being a pale, cheap imitation of what he'd had when he'd had his son.

Apparently not, because the ability to be ripped to shreds by what he was feeling seemed to be alive and kicking so completely that he was willing to die rather than risk losing the woman who stood, albeit still rather woozily, in front of him.

He flashed her an apologetic look before returning to his bout of wall contemplation. His feelings had gotten her into trouble, and there was no way that he could really make it better. It wasn't fair – she deserved better than to have her CO mess up her life with an impossible dream, even if she felt something for him in return.

"Sir," she continued. "We weren't telling the whole truth, and that's why the machine thinks the memories are false."

His jaw set for a second as he looked into the middle distance, then he turned back to her.

"Really?" he asked, almost hopefully, as if he was hoping for a get-out clause. He could see where this was headed, and he did not like it. It was hard enough looking Carter in the eye at the minute, and she already knew. That he was completely in love with her.

Crap. He'd been hoping that they could just sweep the entire thing under a rug, and forget about it. The last thing that Carter needed was him messing up her career by developing inappropriate feelings for her and there wasn't really any way that his feelings could get more inappropriate. But he'd hoped to pretend that they weren't there. He'd been good at pretending that his feelings weren't there. Not that they had been at first – which had made it worse. He knew that this was, or could have been, the real thing. It wasn't just a flash of lust intensified. When you were so infatuated with someone's smile that you'd go to any ridiculous lengths to see it, quite happy to throw yourself in front of her microscope to try and look goofy, then it probably wasn't just physical attraction.

She just looked at him. There really wasn't any way out of this apart from the one she was proposing, but he looked into her eyes anyway, hoping for a Carter brainwave. Right about now. How come she only had the brainwaves when the fate of the planet depended on it? If the fate of the human race depended on him not having to do this, then she'd think of something.

He gave her a nod of assent, completely unhappy with what was about to go down. The look in her eyes told him that not only was she feeling the same, but that she knew exactly what he was feeling, too. It was getting to be a habit. And in some ways he didn't mind – it was the rest of the damn base he had a problem with.

He watched her stand up. He was going to get her court-marshalled and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, though he vowed to protect her as much as was humanly possible.

She looked into the eyes of the observers.

"Retest him."


	2. Show And Tell

He entered the infirmary cautiously, still not comfortable with what was essentially a giant invisible bug-looking alien being somewhere around. Especially when "Mom" was as dangerous as Carter's dad had insinuated, never mind that she was here to give a warning.

At the sound of his footsteps, Charlie looked over. The innocent, fragile, lost look that the tiny boy had on that infirmary bed was only enhanced by the quick swipe of his arm across his eyes. It was the embodiment of everything that Jack wanted to protect, and his heart quietly ached for this little boy, who'd lost everything, and from what the Doc said, could lose more than everything. He didn't know whether to be angry that the Reetou had created him, with so much stacked against him, or not.

"Mother says not to cry."

He glanced briefly to where presumably "Mom" was before moving into the room, hands outstretched for a second as he reached the bed, as if to ask her what the hell she was thinking. The hands returned to the pockets as he resisted the urge to just gather the kid up and try and make it better. Somehow, he thought that this little boy in front of him had seen far too much, was far too worldly wise to buy that a hug made the world right.

Charlie also glanced in the same general direction. "She says the boys of your culture do not cry."

Huh. So presumably she hadn't been around that long – probably got her ideas of culture from watching TV over Teal'c's shoulder, so god only knew what she thought of the planet. The big guy had some dubious viewing habits going on.

"Not true," he replied emphatically, withdrawing one hand from the safety of the pocket to back up his point. "In fact," he continued, settling on the bed and drawing nearer as if he was about to impart some great secret, "there's an official list of reasons for which crying is a… good thing."

He was waving his arms about too much, over gesturing in a way that any of his team would immediately recognise as Jack O'Neill either being overly enthusiastic about something or just plain making it up. The rest of the time he could manage to keep his hands fairly still, even if they itched to emphasise a point or clarify. He just had to hope that he was on a roll, here.

He could see the cogs turning in Charlie's head as the young boy decided whether to believe him or not. Finally seeming satisfied with the explanation, he unburdened his greatest trouble.

"Mother is leaving."

"Now see," he told him. "That's a good reason." The loss of everything that he'd seen in his short life up until the Stargate had thrown him into the path of the SGC. And all he'd seen of the SGC was the Gateroom and the infirmary. That was a good enough reason to cry in anyone's book, surely. 'Mom leaving', I believe," he informed him in what he hoped was a confident and reassuring manner, "is number six on the list of good reasons. Actually," he corrected himself, gesturing to cut himself off mid sentence with what he hoped was a convincing act. "Six is 'Mom says she's leaving in a couple of days'. Five is 'Mom leaving immediately'. Four, of course, is 'Mom already left'." He gazed off into the middle distance for a second, briefly suppressing the memory of another boy called Charlie who'd cried because his Dad had commited six, five and four more often than Jack could recall comfortably. Not that he'd let Jack see that – no, in front of his Dad, Charlie had tried to be the tough guy, waving him off with no hint of anything sad. It'd been left to Sara to tell her husband just how much their little boy had missed him, and he'd never really appreciated the depth of what she'd tried to tell him. Until it was too late.

"Now, three…three is huge. One of the bigger ones on the list," he started before the Charlie in front of him sat up a little, looked him squarely in the eye piercingly and interrupted, thankfully – he wasn't sure how he could top 'Mom left' in these circumstances.

"She's still here." Jack looked over to where, hopefully, Mom was stood. And if she wasn't he hoped that she could find it in her heart, or any other similar organ, to forgive him. "She's leaving as soon as she has told you everything that can help," the boy continued matter of factly.

_Thank you Mom. Just what we need – an ally that can tell us everything that can help._

"She's not taking you with her?" he asked softly, his gaze flittering from the bedcovers to the boy's face, unable to hold that frank, honest gaze for too long without letting his overwhelming sympathy for him engulf him. If Mom had a heart, he could admire her for giving up her son, leaving him for what she thought would be his greater good. If Mom didn't have a heart, he'd kick her ass from one end of the galaxy to the other for abandoning Charlie like this. No kid deserved to be abandoned like that, even if that was how it had to go down.

"Well, for what its worth, I think she's right," he said, then paused, trying to find something to say that would explain exactly what he meant. "I think you should stay here. You'd be better off." That sounded autocratic, harsh and wrong. But these… people, for want of a better word, had screwed around with this kid for far too long, in Jack's opinion, without thinking about what was best for him, what would let him _live, _ f'cryin'outloud. They made him, and tinkered with him, and used him, then dumped him on someone else because they either couldn't or wouldn't undo the mess they'd made of his insides and brain.

His next words, though, stunned the man. "I think I belong with you, Jack."

The certainty, the trust, the sheer confidence that this boy was displaying in him was breathtaking. He hadn't seen that trust placed in him by a child in a very long time – the trust that any kid gives their parent to do their best for them. Sure, Cassie trusted him, had fun with him and would occassionally run to him with her childish – and some not so childish, for she'd seen things that no twelve year old should have ever seen – but she was the Doc's, and Carter's. She placed that trust in the two of them, and even that was shrinking down to just Doc Fraiser, slowly but surely. And Carer knew it too; that was one thing that he could see in her eyes as she watched adoptive mother and daughter. And she knew it was necessary, and she knew that they all knew why she did what she did, Cassie included, but it still hurt her, he could see.

He really didn't know what to say to that. So, with his typically confrontational skills, he didn't.

"Look, Charlie," he said, glancing down for a second. He'd been trying so hard, really. Not to say that name and think of a sandy haired boy that had even less of a chance than the one sat in front of him. And he'd done so well, too. "Um…Before she leaves, do you think she could she tell us where we can find these rebel Reetous?"

Charlie looked at Mom. Jack looked, too, out of reflex more than the hope of learning anything from doing it.

"She says she'll show me the address," he announced with confidence – a confidence that Jack sincerely hoped was justified. If they couldn't find the co-ordinates, the Reetou would, in all likelihood, find themselves with free rein of the entire planet. With only Teal'c as a detection method, the chances of them even realising that they'd got an infiltrator were dismally low. Add to the fact that Teal'c was blatantly too valuable to leave posted by the 'Gate day and night, and their chances lowered dramatically again. Earth would not be a happy place if they let even one through.

"That'd be great," he assured the boy with genuine thankfulness in his voice. Massive cities being laid to waste for the sake of a potential threat wouldn't sit easy with him on a theoretical scale, even given that he'd done things himself that didn't sit easy on histheoretical scale. It would be a waste. The nadd in the minor detail that this was his planet, his country that they were talking about - well, wasn't that why he got a regular paycheck – to stop it happening?

Charlie started to study the bedcovers with an intensity equal to his adult companion. "Jack?" he asked, hopefully, tentatively, nervously, almost. "Could I be your son for a while?"

The sentence echoed in his brain, rebounding off various neurons before registering. Brown eyes widened in shock. He was being offered a second chance. A chance to prove to the world, to himself, that he wasn't a screw-up. He could do this. Here was a boy who was willing to place the rest of his life into his hands. He wasn't sure he was up to it, but he wanted to be, desperately.

But. He screwed up last time. He wasn't sure he was that great, even before. Never around, missing game after game after parent's evening. He'd missed his Charlie's first steps, his first words. Hell, he'd missed his birth because he was sneaking around Berlin. It wasn't fair to this boy to ask him to do that. It wasn't fair to never be there, to always have to put country before self or family. He loved having a family, he missed being 'Dad' with every fibre that his being possessed, but he wasn't sure that he could do it again. He'd had his heart ripped out once in this lifetime and he sure as hell couldn't do it again.

"I don't know, Charlie. I don't think you'd want that," he replied with as much honesty s he could muster, grimacing slightly.

And he couldn't do it to Charlie. His Charlie. The little boy in front of him was an amazing person, and there would be nothing more than Jack would like than to take him and make everything okay, to fix him, but he wasn't sure that he could live with the guilt. It would be too much like trying to replace his son, and that just wasn't possible. Never again would a child look at him with Sara's eyes, but filled with his own mischief.

"Yes, I do. You'd be great. I can tell," declared the child – the child with no knowledge of the gunshot that had ended the life of Jack O'Neill, part one, and left him in a kind of purgatory before he was allowed to start the life of Jack O'Neill, part two. A life that had been relatively Charlie-less, give or take alien incursions.

He couldn't do it, but he wanted to. He could, but he didn't want to. He didn't know.

"I'll tell you what. Let's deal with these Reetou, then we'll talk about it, okay?" he bargained, knowing as he did that this was not a good sign. This was how it was always going to be, if he had anything to do with this child. The war against the Goa'uld would always take a frontseat, and Charlie deserved so much more than Jack could give him – he needed a proper family, a life that didn't involve the possibility of his guardian not coming home, or worse still, coming home with a snake in his head. That was one possibility that hadn't haunted Charlie O'Neill's dreams at night.

"Okay."

"Okay."

Okay – so assuming that he survived the attack from the invisible enemy, he was going to have to sit down and decide Charlie's future. The future that the child in question had firmly and unhaltingly placed squarely into his hands. A future, he thought soberly, that was going to be very short, if he'd heard the implications the Doc made correctly. Would it be so bad? To take care of him in his rapidly destabilising condition? Could he live through that again – to lose another child – granted not his son, but if this Charlie – Reetou Charlie – could find a place in his heart in so short a time, what was it going to be like to lose him? Would it not be better to lose him now than to wait, and let him burrow so much deeper? But how could he reject him? With a heavy heart, he threw himself into the tactics of what was ahead, trying to take his mind off a young boy with earnest eyes.


End file.
